I swear that AI could independently develop a cure for cancer and people would still say that it's not actually intelligent, just matrix multiplications giving a statistically probable answer!

LLMs are at least designed to be intelligent. Our monkey brains have much less reason to be intelligent, since we only evolved to survive nature, not to understand it.

We are at this moment extremely deep into what most people would have been considered to be actual artificial intelligence a mere 15 years ago. We're not quite at human levels of intelligence, but it's close.

▲

qsera 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

>AI could independently develop a cure for cancer

All the answers for all your questions is contained in randomness. If you have a random sentence generator, there is a chance that it will output the answer to this question every time it is invoked.

But that does not actually make it intelligent, does it?

▲

famouswaffles 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You are arguing a point no-one is making. LLMs are not random sentence generators. Its probability distributions are anything but random. You could make an actual random sentence generator, but no-one would argue about its intelligence.

▲

graemefawcett 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

This is exactly how problem solving works, regardless of the substrate of cognition.

Start with "all your questions contained in randomness" -> the unconstrained solution space.

The game is whether or not you can inject enough constraints to collapse the solution space to one that can be solved before your TTL expires. In software, that's generally handled by writing efficient algorithms. With LLMs, apparently the SOTA for this is just "more data centers, 6 months, keep pulling the handle until the right tokens fall out".

Intelligence is just knowing which constraints to apply and in what order such that the search space is effectively partitioned, same thing the "reasoning" traces do. Same thing thermostats, bacteria, sorting algorithms and rivers do, given enough timescale. You can do the same thing with effective prompting.

The LLM has no grounding, no experience and no context other than which is provided to it. You either need to build that or be that in order for the LLM to work effectively. Yes, the answers for all your questions are contained. No, it's not randomness. It's probability and that can be navigated if you know how

▲

qsera 3 hours ago | parent [-]

You can constrain the solution space all you want, but if you don't have a method to come up with possible solutions that might match the constraints, you ll be just sitting there all day long for the machine to produce some results. So intelligence is not "just knowing which constraints to apply". It is also the ability to come up with solutions within the constraints without going through a lot of trial and error...

But hey, if LLMs can go through a lot of trial and error, it might produce useful results, but that is not intelligence. It is just a highly constrained random solution generator..

	▲	graemefawcett 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I believe that's I and the paper are both saying as well. The LLM is pure routing, the constraints currently are located elsewhere in the system. In this case, both the constraints and the motivation to perform the work are located in Knuth and his assistant. Routing is important, it's why we keep building systems that do it faster and over more degrees of freedom. LLMs aren't intelligent on their own, but it's not because they don't have enough parameters

▲

wang_li 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Last week I put "was val kilmer in heat" into the search box on my browser. The AI answer came back with "No, Val Kilmer was not in heat. Val Kilmer played Chris Shiherlis in the movie Heat but the film did not indicate that he was pregnant or in heat. His performance was nuanced and skilled and represents a high point of the film." I was not curious about whether he was pregnant.

We are not only not close to human level of intelligence, we are not even at dog, cat, or mouse levels of intelligence. We are not actually at any level of intelligence. Devices that produce text, images, or code do not demonstrate intelligence any more than a printer producing pages of beautiful art demonstrate intelligence.

▲

DennisP 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Honestly, when I read your first sentence, given the lack of a capital H, my brain initially went the same direction the AI did. Then I realized what you meant but since I already went there, I might have made a similar response as a joke. For the sake of my ego I'm forced to reject your claim that this is evidence of stupidity.

▲

sosodev 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The model that processes search results is tiny and dumb. You shouldn't compare it to the frontier models that are solving complex math problems.

	▲	StilesCrisis 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		On Google, just clicking "AI Mode" gives you a substantially smarter model, and it's still pretty weak. But I assume the OP wasn't talking about Google because it doesn't seem to make this mistake even in a search.

▲

worldsavior 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's wrong. Humans were evolved to have big brains so they can better understand the env and use it to their advantage.

I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. I rather think and not waste time on something that only remembers data, and doesn't even understand it.

Reasoning in AI is only about finding contradictions between his "thoughts", not actually understand it.

	▲	someplaceguy 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. In contrast with humans, who are famously known for never making stupid silly mistakes...
	▲	_fizz_buzz_ 5 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> I still see AI making stupid silly mistakes. Humans also make silly mistakes.